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Games in the Workplace?
Anonymous Coward asks: "Back in the day it was not uncommon for games to contain 'Escape Buttons' and other commands to quickly exit a game. These games appealed to the Geek at Work as he could fill in his Friday afternoon and as soon as he heard his boss' shoes approaching, he could escape from the third dungeon and return to his spreadsheet. Yet games today are not allowing such activities to occur. Most games are requiring so much dedicated action that it is impossible to play a game and still switch back and forth without long delays. Where are the games for the worker?"
Emulators!!!
Many of the NES and SNES emulators will run in windowed mode or will let you freeze the game and alt tab out of it.
Also there are a few emulators with network enabled so you can play multiplayer with other people.
Also Diablo II works good.
Destruction Zone a old tank combat game from the old days of 94(still quite fun to play)
feel free to add to the list.
Also I imagine many people at work wont be useding win98. they are forced to use something along the lines of Windows NT or 2K based upon thier job.
-THIS SPACE FOR RENT!
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that dosent always work, and in games it only works with about half of them, and usually there is a long delay, and it ends up crashing, or freezing in the game which would make the situation even worse
and Windows+M = Minimize all
Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.
Nethack is the best.
No one at my call center knows what it is.Also if you stop playing, you don't get killed.
--- Evil robots don't kill people, Mad scientists kill people.
There is a new version of xquake that allows you to set a variable fastquit. a simple config like:
:)
fastquit 1
bind F12 "quit"
and you're golden. the screen goes back into windows very quick, and no trace of the game is left. It works, trust me
"i can never say no to anyone but you"
Back in the day, we used to rename our binaries so that when we ran 'tf' (TinyFugue, a MUD client) or 'nethack' or 'slirp' (a user-mode PPP tunnel for dialup users), the sysadmin running 'top' would see 'emacs', 'gcc', and 'spice', etc.
I used to be an "alt-tab" slave myself, but its WAY to obvious... the boss materializes in your doorway and you fumble for the right keys, that's rookie ball... the pros know that mapping the depression of your mouse wheel to "alt-tab" is far more efficient and less conspicuous. Works great for the occasional pr0n fix as well :)
There are some very interesting text games like Nethack and GnuGo. Both are free and run on several platforms. And without graphics you're less likely to get caught ;)
First, Baldur's Gate has a great option... in the Options tab you can set BG to run in a window instead of full-screen. This can kill the playability on older PCs but BG isn't an action game so it's still a viable option.
Also many games support the (on windows) ALT+ENTER hotkey to switch between normal and full screen mode (like if you're watching a DVD or MPEG you can switch this way).
But whatever your game of choice, if, unlike at Kasmiur's, your workplace does not allow games, you might want to look into an insanely useful program called "Watchcat." First of all, it's FREEWARE. The program, either by clicks or hotkeys, will hide any or all applications currently running... so if you're a Solitaire freak and you hear someone coming up, smack that hotkey and not only is the game off the desktop, it's off of the taskbar too. This program ROCKS.
Here's a small article about the program on Tech TV
[Windows + M]
All open windows are minimized.
Perhaps its a new "feature."
Actually, this "new" feature has been in all Windows versions since 98, possibly even since 95. There's several more, like Windows + R (Run), Windows + E (Explorer), etc.
Companies that understaff are probably more likely to go under, as all their customers leave.
Not only will their customers, but the employees that work there will also. I work in a call center and I am almost ready to quit my job because of that reason.
So climate's changing. So what? It has always changed. The big news would be if it wasn't changing. - Dr. Philip Stone
I was just reading a history of the potato that made an interesting observation: how rare and new wages that allow one to get more than just food and a tiny bit extra really are. The debates during the 17th through 19th centuries in England and Ireland about the potato involved questions of morality: by introducing a subsistance crop that was cheaper to produce and had little market value, it drove down the price of labor to where the peasants had less market clout than before. The enclosure act already had reduced the food-gathering options of the peasantry.
The realities of the situation were pretty complicated: there were landlords, reformers, Irish, and English on both sides of the potato debate; it ended up involving Malthus and Ricardo, for whom the potato had symbolic force (for Malthus, it represented the minimal human, the man of appetites who would, despite all enculturation, follow those appetites to the detriment of the common good; for Ricardo, it represented a breakdown of the market economy by being a foodstuff outside the market.) Actually, I don't know what this has to do with the post I'm replying to. I'm kind of delerious: I just got Virtua Fighter 4 and Pac-Man World 2, and haven't been sleeping much. But it was a very interesting article.
Magic the Gathering is always a fun one. You can download a free graphical tabletop based freeware program that allows one to play with anyone over the Internet.
The program contains a working database of every Magic card ever created as well as a means to keep track of all the information required to conduct a full game, so you don't have to spend money on tons of cards in order to create an asesome deck.
Apprentice requires Windows 95, 98, NT, or 2000. Development for Macintosh, Linux, and BeOS will begin after Apprentice 2.0 is completed.
What about Nethack? Low system requirements, but incredably playable.
- "I'll probably get modded down for this."
And for us *nix users there are always the dockapps. Having a window manager that supports dockapps is not a requirement. The dockapps just won't dock, that's all.
Ahh, no, you've just used the system menu (the one which comes from the icon in the top left of the window) and you've also just moved not minimised :-)
:-)
Alt-space-R - restores (unmaximises)
Alt-space-M - moves (use the cursor keys or mouse, enter or click to confirm)
Alt-space-S - sizes (cursor to grab edge, scroll in and out, enter to confirm)
Alt-space-X - maximises
Alt-space-C - closes. Yes, that's a destrictive shortcut next to another key, not bright...
This is saying there's a bunch of other keyboard shortcuts triggered by the Windows key. Off the top of my head:
Windows M - minimises all active windows.
Windows D - shows the desktop. Toggles.
Windows E - open windows explorer
Windows F - open Find Files
Windows R - open Run dialog
Windows Pause Break - opens System Properties
Windows F1 - opens Windows help.
There's probably more, they're just the ones I know
Greg
(Inside a nuclear plant)
Aaaarrrggh! Run! The canary has mutated!